The problem didn't get solved. It got replaced by the product you built to solve it.
Editorial insight
There's a moment in every product cycle that almost no one names. It's the moment a team stops being obsessed with the problem and starts being obsessed with the thing it built to solve the problem.
It doesn't happen with a decision. It happens with a drift. The meetings change subject. The metrics that get tracked are the ones that flatter the build. New features start being justified by their technical elegance or their roadmap momentum, not by the problem they actually move.
The uncomfortable part: this happens in good teams. The build is real, so defending it starts to feel like defending the work itself.
Uri Levine has a line about this: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. It's the kind of sentence that's easy to nod at and hard to live with.
Value piece
A two-question audit for your current roadmap
The drift is hard to spot from the inside. So here's a small exercise we've seen work in client teams. Just fifteen minutes, done out loud, with the whole product team in the room.
Take your current roadmap. For every item on it, answer two questions:
What specific problem, for a specific user, does this solve?
If we removed it, would the problem stop being solved, or would the product just get smaller?
The first question is the warm-up. The second one is where the conversation gets honest. It exposes the items that are on the roadmap for other reasons: because someone got excited, because it's half-built, because it demos well, because it was politically easier to keep than to kill.
The goal here is for the team to know, item by item, why something is there. Items that survive both questions deserve the team's time. Items that don't may stay, but everyone in the room understands they're staying for reasons that aren't the user's problem.
Teams that run this audit once a quarter tend to ship smaller products, used more often, and easier to explain to new hires six months later.
A small ask: we're putting together internal work on how product teams actually answer these two questions, and the patterns we're seeing across clients are interesting. If you try the audit, we'd love to hear what showed up. Even one sentence is useful.
📲 Or message us on WhatsApp (if a voice note is easier)
Untile Picks & Trends Radar
→ From our blog this week: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. What Uri Levine said at SIM Conference 2026 in Porto, and what stayed with our Business and Marketing team after the talk. Read on the blog.
→ Worth reading next: Product vs. Feature Teams, by Marty Cagan. A short, blunt piece on the difference between teams that ship features and teams that solve problems. Lands hard right after the audit above. Read on SVPG.
→ And if you want to go deeper: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, on how to talk to users without filtering what you hear. Uri Levine's Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution sits on the same shelf.
Case Studies
From two audiences to one site that earns trust on both sides
The brief said "website". The real work was rebuilding trust.
VerifiCar needed a complete website redesign launched in sync with a national campaign, speaking to two very different audiences: buyers and sellers of used cars.
The obvious move was to skip ahead and ship a clean marketing site on time. We did the opposite. Before any design, we ran moderated interviews and usability tests with real users. Mapping how each side actually thought about used cars, and what the old site was getting wrong.
The site launched on time, mobile-first, with a simplified booking flow and copy anchored on the two words users kept repeating: clarity and transparency.
The shortcut would have looked the same on launch day. It wouldn't have held up after it.
Inside Untile
The kind of conversation that doesn't fit in a deck. Open Days #6, at the Untile office.
→ Open Days #6 just happened. This edition brought together leading voices from the corporate world to talk about how innovation actually takes shape inside large organisations: the pressures, the constraints, and what makes it work. Check the recap.
→ We're hiring a Product Manager. If you know someone who likes B2B products and the kind of problems that don't always demo well, send them our way. See the role.
From the team
"Technical depth used to be the differentiator. With AI in the mix, it's the baseline. What separates teams now is clarity of thought — because AI executes fast in any direction, including the wrong one."
Till next month!
At Untile, we work with teams who'd rather ask the right question once than build the wrong thing twice. If that sounds familiar, it's worth a conversation.